Like The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The Hundred-Year-Old Man who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first new novel since Never Let Me Go a decade ago appears to be another of those elderly odysseys we’ve seen with such zeitgeist-like regularity recently—albeit one with the trappings, and the characters, of a classical fantasy.

There be dragons in this book, to be sure—alongside sprites, ogres, wizards and warriors—and you can practically taste the magic in the air of its Arthurian England. But never mind that, or the fact that its narrative is arranged around an epic quest, because The Buried Giant is at its best when it’s about Axl and Beatrice, a loving couple who leave their humble home ostensibly to travel to a village a few days walk away. There, the pair hope to renew their relationship with their estranged son.

A simple enough thing, you might think, but the kicker—the tragedy, in truth—is that they don’t really remember him. They don’t really remember much of anything.

Allow Dan Harmon to show you something beautiful. In the new trailer for the probability-defying new season of Community, Age of Yahoo, we meet a new allies, old friends, and we get to watch Dean Pelton have entirely too much fun with VR! We have lost Troy and Original Shirley, but it looks like we're gaining some prime Chang moments, and possibly more Garrett?

Will Jeff Winger ever get out of Greendale? Will New Shirley replace Original Shirley in our hearts? Is Keith David the fourth Ghostbuster? Check out the trailer below, and watch the new season of Community via Yahoo on March 17th!

Fantastical settings are one of the major draws of speculative fiction. The places where novels are set don’t just provide a backdrop for the plot, they often drive it. They establish the tone of the story and inform the sensibilities of the characters. Nowhere is this truer than in fictional cities, which are both the product of and the backdrop for the characters and their cultures.

These cities are Weird-with-a-capital-W. They’re freakish and fascinating. They’re constructs that reflect the anxieties and aspirations of their societies, and they’re palimpsests for histories that have been built, destroyed, and redefined over generations. Their crooked alleys and towering buildings frame the stories of savvy world-beaters and set the stage for epic clashes of ideology.

There’s this thing called the “Twenty Year Rule” that pertains to collective cultural nostalgia, and if one is to give credence to this idea, then the recent resurgence of interest in The X-Files comes as no surprise. IDW Publishing has been running a well-received comic adaptation over the last several years, and just a few weeks ago Fox confirmed that they’re in talks to reboot the series, original cast and everything. And the nerdosphere rejoiced! Are you excited? I’m kind of excited! Kind of.

Manchester-based artist James Chapman publishes weekly “international sound” comics, which illustrate onomatopoeia and examine sounds in other languages. Recently, he posted International Heroes, which presents various Marvel superheroes by their names in other languages. “Some of these are from the comics and some are from the movies,“ he explained. ”They change their names more often than they change into their costumes.” We just love that Spider-Man and Rocket Raccoon’s names translate to “Pokémber” and “Blunderbuss” in Hungarian.

Afternoon Roundup brings you a possible Spider-Man director, Jurassic World’s new and old beasties, and dream wizarding schools across the globe.

All original posts are listed in The Wheel of Time Reread Index here, and all Redux posts will also be archived there as well. (The Wheel of Time Master Index, as always, is here, which has links to news, reviews, interviews, and all manner of information about the Wheel of Time in general on Tor.com.)

Hotly anticipated doesn’t quite cut the mustard as a means of describing the excitement surrounding the publication of The Skull Throne, and though the fourth volume of Peter V. Brett’s bestselling fantasy saga is almost upon us, it wasn’t until this week that we knew what it would look like.

The design isn’t quite as striking as I’d like, but it’s what happens under the covers that counts, and from the synopsis it sounds as if The Skull Throne stands a chance of making up for the momentum The Demon Cycle lost in The Daylight War.

Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s original stories.

Today we’re looking at “The Horror at Red Hook,” written in August 1-2 1925 and first published in the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales. We read it so you don’t have to, but if you really want to it’s here. Spoilers ahead, and also bigotry.

Welcome to The Coode Street Podcast, an informal weekly discussion about science fiction and fantasy featuring award-winning critics and editors Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe. The Coode Street Podcast debuted in 2010 and has been nominated for the Hugo, British Science Fiction, and Aurealis awards.

As the Aurealis Awards reach their twentieth anniversary, Jonathan sits down with Aurealis Awards judging coordinator Tehani Wessely, publisher Alisa Krasnostein, and critic Sean Wright to discuss the Aurealis Awards, their history and the recently released 2014 Aurealis Awards shortlist.

Welcome to The Coode Street Podcast, an informal weekly discussion about science fiction and fantasy featuring award-winning critics and editors Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe. The Coode Street Podcast debuted in 2010 and has been nominated for the Hugo, British Science Fiction, and Aurealis awards.

We are always on the look-out for new and exciting books to read, and always want to know what we should keep an eye out for. For years we’ve relied on Locus’s quarterly Forthcoming Books issues as a guide on what to look for.

One of the very earliest ideas for the Coode Street Podcast was that each month we’d sit down and discuss the newest issue of Locus. That didn’t happen, but hopefully this is the start of a new series where, once every three months, we sit down with Locus Editor-in-Chief Liza Trombi to discuss what’s new and exciting, and what we all should be looking for in the months ahead. Our thanks to Liza for making time to record the podcast. The March issue of Locus is on sale now.

The latest installment in Chloe Neill’s Chicagoland Vampire series, Dark Debt, hits shelves today, and we want to send one lucky winner all eleven books in the series to celebrate!

If you haven’t already jumped the adventures of Caroline Evelyn Merit—former ballet dancer, avid sports fan, and reluctant vampire—here's your chance to read all of the books, from Some Girls Bite to Dark Debt. And if you’re already a fan, we know you’ll want to get your hands on the complete series!

Comment in the post to enter!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A purchase does not improve your chances of winning. Sweepstakes open to legal residents of 50 United States and D.C., and Canada (excluding Quebec). To enter, comment on this post beginning at 1:30 PM Eastern Time (ET) on March 3. Sweepstakes ends at 12:00 PM ET on March 7. Void outside the United States and Canada and where prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules here. Sponsor: Tor.com, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. While the format has been the same for the past forty-something columns from me in the series, we’re switching things up a bit based on reader feedback: from here on out I’ll be talking about more stories at less length, so we’ll be covering more than just a few things per month. This means more coverage of more folks, which is something people have been looking for, so—here we are for a fresh take on a familiar project.

Stories this installment come from various publications, though as this new format goes forward we’ll also often cover whole issues of one magazine (or chunks from a single anthology) as well. This time around, I looked at pieces from Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Weird Fiction Review.

Ignore the stirrings of war. Let the carriage to a royal ball wait. There is a story to be told: of a starless night, a mother and her sick son, and a mortal who falls in love with the snow god, and will do anything to have her...

Read “Bridge of Snow,” originally published January 28, 2014 on Tor.com. The story is set in the world of Rutkoski’s novel The Winner’s Curse and its new sequel, The Winner’s Crime.

This short story was acquired and edited for Tor.com by Mac Kids editor Janine O’Malley.

With the perpetual Disney princess fanart overload, it’s refreshing to see someone take on all of Disney’s beloved characters. On his blog Disney Animated Features, Barcelona-based artist Rafael Mayani tasked himself with drawing one illustration per animated Disney movie (excluding direct-to-video releases). Manyani watched the films in chronological order before illustrating them, starting in April 2013 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and concluding this past December with Big Hero 6. Even better, Manyani had concluded a Pixar master class before starting the blog, so all of his illustrations are in the Pixar house style.

Season 2 of Orphan Black ended with so many revelations about who and what the Clone Club was really dealing with, but season 3 seems to contain even more secrets for Sarah and her sisters to uncover. After months of short, character-based videos with vague hints, BBC America has released the first full trailer.

The best thing I can say about The Buried Life, Carrie Patel’s debut novel from Angry Robot Books, is that it’s an interesting mess of a book. In its favour, it’s not a boring mess, but structurally and in terms of its approach to exposition, it feels more like a treatment for a videogame than a novel proper.

In the underground city of Recoletta, Inspector Liesl Malone finds herself called to the scene of a murder. The victim is a historian, one of the few at work within the city: for in Recoletta the study of history, especially history that predates the Catastrophe that resulted in the city’s founding, is tightly controlled by the secretive Directorate of Preservation. Before her investigation gets very far, a second, connected murder among Recoletta’s elite sees Malone pulled off the case. But this second murder has left a potential witness: the laundress Jane Lin. And Malone doesn’t appreciate being sidelined while Recoletta’s ruling council sends its own investigators after the murderer. She’s determined to get to the truth, even when Recoletta’s elite don’t want it uncovered.

Polansky gamely poked fun at himself, first referring to himself as “a writer of genre fiction, which is a rather precious way of saying that at some point in my books (generally speaking, early and often) people die violently.” When asked to suggest a clickbait article title for Those Above, he jokingly offered up “Elves with swords! Chainmail bikinis! Small words! BEYONCE BEYONCE BEYONCE!” Check out the highlights from his r/fantasy AMA!

Since 1993, George R.R. Martin has used Texas A&M’s Cushing Memorial Library and Archives as the official respository for his manuscripts, books, and memorabilia. Over the years, he has donated various papers and texts to the library for protection and archiving. This past weekend, Martin added another book to the list: A first-edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Even better, this donation marked the library’s five millionth text.

For over a decade, Jim Killen has served as the science fiction and fantasy book buyer for Barnes & Noble. Every month on The B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog and Tor.com, Jim shares his curated list of the month’s can’t-miss new SF/F releases.

This month at Tiamat’s Terrain the cluster of SFF features frame big questions: Both Israeli writer Tidhar and Cypriot director Kyriacou want to know “What’s a superhero anyhow?” Palestinian-American Abdelrazaq and Lebanese-Canadian El-Mohtar think through the ever-present questions of displacement and coping in times of war. Noura Al Noman explores what Arabic fantasy literature and world building look like, while Franscesco Verso has started a publishing house for speculative fiction in translation, wanting to open doors into how other cultures and languages write about tomorrow. And finally, last year’s IPAF winner has an English publication date.